Tom Shapiro of Cultural Strategy Partners, Peter Linett of
Slover Linett Strategies Inc. and Betty Farrell and Will Anderson at the CPC
recruited eight museum directors and five outside experts from the art/museum
world to look at how the field of college and university museums is evolving.
Now that the report is out, it’s my turn to “think out loud” about how to
promote “healthy evolution” and ask “what can these museums do differently or
better to bring about [an] ideal future?”

With the blessing of the authors, I’m going to highjack the
conversation and continue it on this blog—first by sharing one thought and two
questions I had upon reading the report, and then by inviting follow up posts
from other readers. I'll also be keeping my eye out for the Kress Foundation Campus Art Museum Study, which is forthcoming.

Thought: The Future
of the Campus

The first thing I want to do is to push campus museums to
think on a longer time frame and a bigger scale. When we consider the future of
the campus art museum, we need to consider the future of the campus itself. As
a number of educators and futurists have pointed out (most recently the
educational futurists at KnowledgeWorks Foundation in their new report, Reigniting
Education) the school of tomorrow will be a very different place—when it is
a place at all.

Mounting educational debt, uncertain prospects for
employment, the outsourcing and devaluation of traditionally high paid career
paths (law, medicine), and the rapid proliferation of low-cost or free,
high-quality instruction via the Web is transforming the landscape of higher
education, and the most fertile innovations are coming in the realm of virtual
education. Established universities are offering courses over the Web (some for credit), wholly
on-line degree granting institutions are springing up and many
organizations are experimenting with
how to create alt credentialing via instruction and experience collected from a
variety of sources. This begs the question, what role will campus museums play
in virtual instruction? Since museums overall are rushing to digitize collections
and create ways for users to interface with their content via the Web, a
college or university that relies heavily on on-line content could,
theoretically, co-opt such resources from a wide variety of sources. How can
the digital presence of a campus museum be tailored in such a way as to support
the unique on-line brand of their parent organization?

While most agree there is a continuing role for the physical
campus, this may take new forms. For example: Northeastern University is building a campus across from Amazon’s
headquarters in Seattle, and much of the instruction will be beamed in from the
university’s home base in Boston. NYU
is building degree-granting campuses in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, and Yale is
building a new
campus in Singapore. If museums are a valued part of the social & education
functions unique to a physical campus, will there be more pressure on campus
museums to create satellites as well? With education increasingly unbundled and
distributed, what is the role of museums in creating a sense of place?

Question 1: Abolishing
Silos

Something bothers me about the way this question is framed,
and to whom. The report itself notes that campus art museums battle the silo
mentality that makes it difficult to create cross-disciplinary value. Why
reinforce these barriers by limiting the conversation to art museums? We are,
as a field, already too inclined to self-identify
by our training and background. If one of the most valuable capacities of
campus museums is their “capacity to do interdisciplinary work,” why not
include other campus museums in the conversation from the start? I tried
reading the report while mentally deleting “art” or “art historical” or “visual
arts” throughout, and it seems to me it works pretty well. I’d be interested to
know if people working in campus museums of anthropology, natural history or
archaeology agree.

Question 2: Academic
Freedom and Freedom of Expression

Participants in this report feel that that campus museums “have
a greater capacity than their non-academic peers to be more experimental and
innovative,” in part because they are protected by academic freedom and use
metrics of success that go beyond attendance.

The fact that campus museums are not always firewalled from political pressure was brought home to
me while I read the report by the controversy at the University of Wyoming over
the deinstallation of the site-specific work “Carbon Sink: what goes around
comes around,” allegedly because of
pressure from legislators and representatives from the coal, mining, gas and
petroleum industries. The artist, Chris Drury, intended the work to provoke
discussion about climate change—though perhaps not this exact discussion. Is
such pressure from funders and influencers really more rare at a university
museum than, for example, at the Smithsonian
or a private
nonprofit? And are campus museums, as a result, more innovative than their
non-campus peers? I’d like to hear what you think.

Call for Comments

So, here’s your
chance to weigh in. Read the report and let me know:

Do you think it asks the most important questions about the
future of campus art museums?

On which points do you agree with the participants and where
do you side with the “counterpoints” offered by the authors? Or do you have a
third point of view to share?

What hasn’t this report asked yet, that we should bring into
the follow-up conversation?

Weigh in here, in the blog comments or contact me
if you are interested in writing a follow-up post.

4 comments:

Beth - Thank you for including this conversation on your blog. In large part, I agree with the questions you raise. My part in this conversation urged colleagues to transfer learning from an ownership of knowledge model to a facilitation model. What continues to energize my thinking around the notion of campus museums as centers of innovation is that learning [in museums]comes from left field. It involves a lot of different sensory experiences. The sage on the stage model does not pertain - which means that other, perhaps playful models can emerge, in which cross-disciplinary ideas are the given. Imagine engineers teaming up with journalists and musicians, let's say, to produce work about mid-20th Century architecture, or Cubism, or the theory of relativity. Educate through engagement; tie interaction directly to lessons. My hope is that the conversation begun through The Future of the Campus Art Museum will not only spur more conversations but implementations.

Thank you for raising the issue of "other" museums on campus. As we work to digitize our art collection, I continually raise the issue of the need to find a common platform to digitize ALL collections on campus (from library special collections to microscopes, from anthropology artifacts to the herbarbarium) to make them searchable from a common site. If people can encounter the primary materials of research in their internet searching, they can begin to make connections across and among collections. Art is one kind of artifact, but the exciting interdisciplinary exhibitions engage many kinds of artifacts, sometimes as art-like objects, but sometimes as carriers of other kinds of meaning.

Thank you for posting an article that really challenges and reactivates the ways in which community, students, and museum professionals think about the futures of campus museums. I coordinate education and public programs for the Art Galleries at Bucknell University. One of our biggest challenges was pointed out in this study- how to cultivate interdisciplinary interest across campus. And, offer programs that interest both our tech-savy student groups, and the more traditional audiences from our pasts. Lots to think about and share with our staff. Thanks for continuing this discussion!